How do fish mate?

[Clairel]

I wouldnt feel embarassed lol i would be cheering lmao !!

I will keep my eyes open

Thanx

Claire x

 

[nmonks]

As I understand it, fish that eat their eggs usually do so to "recycle" the nutrients because they feel that the chances of raising the fry is too small. By eating the eggs, the parents can reuse the nutrients for another batch when the conditions are right.

Other animals do this too, including, rather gruesomely, marsupials like kangaroos, which will pull out small (barely more than embryonic) joeys from the pouch and eat them it the climate turns bad or they are beginning to starve. This is supposedly one reason why marsupials are dominant in Australia even though there are numerous placental mammals (such as bats and rodents) that might have displaced them. Placental mammals are supposedly "better" than marsupials. Anyway, in Australia, which is a dry continent with a harsh climate, marsupials can effectively abort their reproductive investment early on, by eating the joey. Placentals are stuck with the embryo until birth, which places a (potentially fatal) drain on the mother's resources.

Back to fish... in corys and cichlids, it can easily be that the fish feel disturbed or stressed by some factor. Perhaps diet, or people watching them, or too many other fish in the tank, etc. So while the instinct for selecting a mate works fine, another instinct is to eat the eggs because they do not believe enough will survive.

Cheers,

Neale

Fascinating stuff, though it doesn't expain the corys.

They can spend hours on mating - and then turn round and eat all their eggs. They certainly don't guard their fry like cichlids. Must have something to do with the egglaying itself, instead: that a small number of eggs (for whatever evolutionary reason) needs to be produced and fertilised again and again.

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[Kopix Nation]

POKE POKE!!!! HAHAHAHaahahahaha hhehehe sorry that was toooo funny...

claire

 

[Angry_Platy]

I have seen my platies "do it" many times. They certainly don't hide it....little exhibitionists they are. All the times I saw the male wiggles his gonopodium right near the female and if she stays there long enough he kinda quickly pokes it in then quickly back out again. Its like REALLY quick, like less than a second I reckon Very much like a jab

Kinda adds a new dimension to a "quickie"

 

[Annastasia]

Gee, I didn't know when I posted that people would get such a kick out of it!

Now that I think about it, I might have seen my Guppies mate...but then, aren't Livebearers ALWAYS trying to mate? I like Angry's way of describing it...a jab.

It's kind of sad how easily we are all amused by this though...

 

[Kopix Nation]

oh well we're all just sick minded fish people here!!! POKE! POKE! JAB! JAB!! Kinda has a rhythm don't it? hahhaha!!!

claire

 

[Clairel]

Thanx...

Its made my day, all this poking n stuff going on

Very imformative.....lol.. I will keep my eyes out for my fishes

Claire x

 

[dwarfgourami]

But Neale, lots of egglaying fish are notorious for eating their eggs, not just in a stress situation but anyway. That's why you are always advised to set up a spawning tank for danios and barbs etc and remove the parents straightaway; it's not just something that might happen by accident if they're not looked after properly, but something they do as a matter of course. Mine have been very carefully conditioned, are almost alone in the tank, and eat their eggs equally well if nobody is in the house. Inchworm tells me this is a specific trait in peppered corys, they are well known for it. I don't think you can compare non-caring fish like corys, with egg-tending fish like cichlids, they are just so totally different.

As I understand it, fish that eat their eggs usually do so to "recycle" the nutrients because they feel that the chances of raising the fry is too small. By eating the eggs, the parents can reuse the nutrients for another batch when the conditions are right.

Back to fish... in corys and cichlids, it can easily be that the fish feel disturbed or stressed by some factor. Perhaps diet, or people watching them, or too many other fish in the tank, etc. So while the instinct for selecting a mate works fine, another instinct is to eat the eggs because they do not believe enough will survive.

Cheers,

Neale

Fascinating stuff, though it doesn't expain the corys.

They can spend hours on mating - and then turn round and eat all their eggs. They certainly don't guard their fry like cichlids. Must have something to do with the egglaying itself, instead: that a small number of eggs (for whatever evolutionary reason) needs to be produced and fertilised again and again.

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[smooth_bourbon]

If you watch the guppy tank at a petstore for a matter of seconds you should be able to see them in the act. It is a constant thing. The males are very impressive they can point their little gonopodium in any direction. I have seen males with no female in reach still swinging it around like its just hoping to make contact with something.

 

[nmonks]

Indeed you are right, but we're talking about slightly different things. Fish can eat their eggs because an instinct is telling them to (e.g., they are stressed by something) or because there is no instinct telling them no to (once the eggs are out, they can be viewed as food).

It's important to distinguish what's happening in an aquarium (an unnatural environment) with what happens in the wild. Take your danios. Presumably there are dozens or hundreds of danios in a school, all mating at roughly the same time and scattering their eggs among, say, some pondweed. Each fish produces hundreds of eggs. Once the eggs are laid, there isn't any extra breeding instinct because there doesn't need to be. The fish return to other behaviours, such as finding food. In this environment some of the eggs may be eaten by the parents, but most will be hidden from them and survive. Of course over the next few days even more of the eggs will be eaten by predators, as will most of the fry. So at any given time, only a tiny percentage of eggs become adult danios.

In the aquarium this numbers game doesn't work. The eggs aren't normally hidden, and we aren't breeding from entire schools of danios. There are no water currents to take the eggs off to refuges amongst the pondweed or algae, and no other foods to catch the attention of the parents. End result: once the fish spawn, they switch over to foraging-for-food mode, and come across their own eggs.

Only where the fish have specific behaviours that become enacted after spawning, as with cichlids and labyrinth fish, does this not normally happen. Of course they can still eat the eggs if they want to recycle the nutrients and try again, but this is an option they have in the wild, too.

I've heard about some fish that are captive bred over many generations having lost some or all of their proper breeding behaviours. Certainly the cheap angelfish sold in the UK fall into this category and often make very bad parents. It's practically essential to pull the parents out of the tank and raise the fry yourself. On the other hand, wild caught cichlids, if they can be cajoled into breeding, usually make outstanding parents. So there's obviously a genetic thing going on here... mass produced fish come from generations of fish that are artificially raised and so have lost some or all of their breeding skills.

Cheers,

Neale

But Neale, lots of egglaying fish are notorious for eating their eggs, not just in a stress situation but anyway. That's why you are always advised to set up a spawning tank for danios and barbs etc and remove the parents straightaway; it's not just something that might happen by accident if they're not looked after properly, but something they do as a matter of course. Mine have been very carefully conditioned, are almost alone in the tank, and eat their eggs equally well if nobody is in the house. Inchworm tells me this is a specific trait in peppered corys, they are well known for it. I don't think you can compare non-caring fish like corys, with egg-tending fish like cichlids, they are just so totally different.

 

[dwarfgourami]

I get it, Neale. Weare indded talking about different things: different instincts in the wild (corys have never had a parenting instinct) and then a new situation in the tank (which might mess up the cichlids' situation).

I think the point I was trying to make was that you distinguished quite sharply between two types of mating behavious: livebearers (showy male, quick mating, no parental instinct) on the one hand, and on the other hand cichlids (long courtship, parental care- which can be messed up by poor conditions)- but that in reality, there are lots of other variations on the theme.ore specifically, I was making the point that a long courtship is not necessily accompanied by parental care, and that the combination long courtship+lack of parental care is not necessarily brought about by unnatural conditions.

In the case of the corys, I don't think they can rely on currents sweeping the eggs away: their natural behaviour is to laboriously fasten egg by egg on a leaf. Probably in the wild, there would be enough plants there to make them forget where they put it, and as you say they get distracted.

 

[jmkgreen]

I have 1x Male, 2x Female Silver Molly fish. I've noticed him kissing/sucking around the female belly and anus many times, today he was clearly leaping upwards, swivelling his gonopodium and "poking" her a few times. She didn't seem stressed, indeed she was following him around some of the time.

Guess babies in about a month...